I kept avoiding this topic – but after a new story coming out, I have to rant.

It makes me sad about what is said on the court of play.  Coaches and players alike – but it is the coaches who have been spotlighted.  And rightfully so – they should be the ones who are showing a bit of decorum.  And instead are acting like schoolyard bullies.

First, there was the story about Michigan State and Tom Izzo during a timeout got so angry at Aaron Henry, that he started berating him on the court and had to be restrained by coaches and players multiple times from continuing to get in the player’s face.  Afterwards, he showed no remorse.  Here were his quotes from the press conference (sourced from ESPN)

What’s wrong with challenging a kid that makes some mistakes?  Aaron Henry — trust me — did some things that you can’t do as a starter on a top-5 team at the end of your freshman year. They were effort-related.  I did get after him. He did respond. He did make a couple of big buckets. He did make some big free throws but that’s not good enough. It’s one-and-done time. The ‘my-bads’ are out the window.”

Then, when continued to be asked about it, he said, “I get a kick out of you guys get[ing] after somebody because you’re trying to hold them accountable.  I don’t know what kind of business you’re in, but I tell you what, if I was a head of a newspaper, and you didn’t do your job, you’d be held accountable. That’s the way it is.”

So, lets put a couple things straight for Coach Izzo.  First of all, as the NCAA constantly reminds us, these are student-athletes.  You are not running a business (or otherwise, your employees are not being paid – well, at least as far as we know).  I totally understand getting upset in the heat of the moment.  I totally understand wanting to make sure that they learn from their mistakes.  But are you seriously trying to tell me the only way that you can do it is to lay your hand on him, start wagging your finger in his face, lunge at him multiple times all while verbally abusing him with words that I could not put on this blog.  You are being paid an amazing amount of money to coach a game – and you can’t figure out a better way to get your point across than that.

But lets get to his point to the press.  Because here is where he is wrong as well.  If he worked as the head of a newspaper or any other industry, and in order to hold his employee accountable for a mistake, he verbally assaulted and phyiscally threatened that employee until others came and separated them, he would likely not be the head of that newspaper or company for much longer.  He definitely would be spending a lot of time with HR as they hold him accountable.

To add to Coach Izzo, in the next game against Minnesota, as they were up 20 points, you heard the announcer say, Coach Izzo never stops no matter what the score – you can hear him yelling at the official about a missed call in a game his team is winning by 20 points.  And right after that, when his team turned the ball over, you could see him turn around in anger and slam both of his fists into the scorer’s table.  IN A GAME HIS TEAM IS WINNING BY 20 POINTS!   But this is acceptable, because he is such a good coach………

That type of reaction is simply not acceptable in any part of our society – so why is it acceptable of a head coach who is supposed to be a role model for these students.  I hear reactions from former players saying that people are growing too soft – a coach is  no longer allowed to yell at their players.  And anyone who has coached, including myself, (whether professional or youth sports) has probably had a moment (or several) where they have yelled at a player or a ref to get their attention because they were angry or upset at something (although admittedly, while yelling is not great, there is a difference between yelling about a bad play or call and being so upset that people have to restrain you from physically attacking someone).  Regardless, competition does not always bring out the best in us.  So, I was considering giving Coach Izzo a pass in my ranting of the blog.

But then I read this article about the UC-Irvine coach Russell Turner.  The questions started when the press noticed him get confronted by Oregon’s player Louis King in the handshake line, and them linger in conversation.

He admitted at this point that he tried to rattle the Oregon player by calling him “Queen” and he had encouraged all his players to call him Queen on the court.  “Double team Queen”.  We were calling him that because we knew it would irritate him and maybe throw him off his game.  Turner claimed that it was a sign of respect – that he was likening King’s importance to the importance of a queen in chess.

But lets be honest, none of us are going to get rattled because we were called the name of a chess piece.  He knew that they were saying an insult that was questioning his masculinity or sexuality – either way, something totally unacceptable.  How is that in any sense of the imagination acceptable coaching – to be telling your players to verbally say things that unacceptable to irritate the opposing team.  This coach literally told his players to display horrible sportsmanship in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage – he should be suspended for those actions.  At a minimum, the referees should have given him a technical foul for his words.  Coaches can not taunt opposing players – and it is mind-blowing that this coach thought it was acceptable to tell his players to also taunt that opposing player.

Whatever happened to sportsmanship.  Whatever happened to referees calling technical fouls for sportsmanship.  And then that leads me to be sad to think what is being said on the court – since if that type of trash talk was coming from both players and coaches towards a player, and it didn’t draw the referee’s attention to call a technical foul, how bad does the trash talking really get (and sadly the answer is much worse than what I have mentioned in this blog post).

It becomes acceptable because it is simply part of the game.  Well, I needed to go on this rant because as Coach Izzo said – we need to hold people accountable.  There is no place in the game for this – and coaches everywhere at every level need to be helping us enforce this.   At a minimum, they definitely can not be the ones encouraging this horrible behavior.  But until coaches like Izzo and Turner realize that their actions promote this lack of sportsmanship, the game will still be full of these bad stories.